Ep 291: 8 Figure Business Exit Strategies with Rachel Murphy

What if achieving an 8-figure business exit was the worst thing for a business owner’s mental health? In this incredible episode, Jaryd Krause interviews Rachel Murphy, an accomplished entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the digital and health services industries.

Rachel is a public speaker and health tech advisor who has founded and sold two companies, including an award-winning digital service firm that led major projects for the NHS and other public sectors.

During their conversation, Rachel shares her journey as a business owner and the challenges she faced when selling her companies. She discusses the tough lessons learned throughout the sale process and how these experiences have influenced her approach to helping other entrepreneurs scale and exit their businesses successfully.

Rachel provides insights on scaling businesses from $2 million to $40 million, effective strategies for preparing a business for sale, and the emotional hurdles that founders often encounter during an exit.

The episode also covers common mistakes many founders make when selling their businesses, such as setting unrealistic expectations and managing emotional struggles post-sale. Rachel highlights the importance of emotional intelligence and resilience for business owners looking to sell, ensuring that their exit is not just financially beneficial but also personally satisfying.

For entrepreneurs considering a business exit or those interested in the nuances of selling a company, this episode offers valuable strategies. Tune in to learn more!

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Episode Highlights

04:20 Rachel’s lessons from her 2 business exits

10:00 Case studies of scaling and getting ready for business exit

19:20 Why people like to buy “results”

26:00 How to make the business attractive for sellers?

32:15 Don’t make impulsive decisions

Courses & Training

Courses & Training

Key Takeaways

When selling a business, it’s crucial to consider the emotional aspects and ensure the decision aligns with personal fulfillment to avoid post-sale regret.

➥ Scaling should not just be about increasing revenue but also about ensuring the business can handle the growth sustainably through technical and operational readiness.

➥ After a sale, it’s important to avoid making impulsive purchases or decisions driven by old aspirations. Thoughtful consideration of one’s current desires and needs is more beneficial.

About The Guest

Rachel has over 20 years of experience in the digital and health industries. She’s an accomplished entrepreneur, public speaker, and health tech advisor. She founded and sold two companies, one of which was Difrent, an award-winning digital services firm that led major projects for the NHS and other public sector clients.

Now, Rachel leads The Grafter, a business consultancy focused on helping professional services companies grow, scale, and increase their value before exiting.

Connect with Rachel Murphy

Transcription:

What if a seven- or eight-figure exit in your business was the worst thing for you mentally?

Hi, I'm Jaryd Krauss, host of the Buying Online Business podcast. today I'm speaking with Rachel Murphy, who has over 20 years experience in the digital and health services industries and is an accomplished entrepreneur, public speaker and health tech advisor. She's founded and sold two companies and an award-winning digital service firm that led major projects for the NHS and other public sectors.

And Rachel now leads the Grafter, which is a business consultancy focused on helping professional services grow, scale, and increase their value before exiting. Now in this podcast episode, Rachel and I talk about where she comes from, where she came from, and what her background is. We talk about her experience in selling her to businesses, what was really tough for her and what she'd learned through that process that is fascinating that you guys should be learning and how this set her up to help people start scaling their businesses for exits.

We do discuss a few different businesses she's worked with in how they've scaled them and the strategies that she built with them to scale those businesses, anywhere from 2 million to the $40 million range. Then we also talk about exiting and where people go wrong and founders go wrong with exiting, not understanding some expectations or setting, limiting beliefs and expectations that can lead to being unfulfilled.

We also talk about the troubles and the treaty intricacies of selling a business and understanding some emotional intelligence as a founder when you're wanting to sell your business. Ensure that you actually are fulfilled after the sale of your business versus selling it and not knowing what to do, where to go and not feeling very happy about what you have actually done.

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Welcome to the Buying Online Businesses podcast. Thank you for coming on.

Absolutely my pleasure, Jaryd. Thank you very much for having me.

You're so welcome. Good to chat to you the other day. We chatted about a bunch of things that I've done, a bunch of things you've been doing in business, and I've got so many great questions I want to dig into today. You mentioned you've been in business for quite a while. I thought yesterday that you actually mentioned that you've bought businesses before; is that the case?

No, I've never bought one. So if I've known how to buy one, Jaryd, I may have done, but no, I've not bought; I've only ever built. I do strongly suspect that buying will be in my future, but it hasn't happened yet.

Yeah, especially because you've been on the sales side a lot and represent, set people up for sales. So you have exited twice, right? You've made two exits, is that right?

Yeah, I exited twice.

Yeah, cool.

And so what did you learn from those two exits as a seller that you just didn't think you would have to know to present to a buyer? What are some of the things that you learned through that process? God, how long have you got?

I've learned a lot is the immediate response. Strangely, I learned a lot about the businesses that I was running as I went through the sale process. And I've subsequently spoken to lots of founders who've gone through that process and have said exactly the same.

But for me, I think that the main takeaway is the fact that I was a domain expert in a certain area. The last business was all around designing and building national systems for UK government and healthcare. And I therefore was an expert in that field and an expert at running a business in that field.

I wasn't an expert in selling a business in that field. the bit that I really learned last time, and I guess the time before, I got a bit of a pass if I'm honest, Jaryd, because my father helped with the sale of the first business and I think he made it look really easy. So I thought, How hard can it be, which is always quite a fatal mistake? So I really earned my stripes on the last one. I think the preparedness for exit is a massive task in its own right.

So being clear around how you position, how you market, and the future potential for the business. And I think the other bit is the mental health side. It's a serious toll. It took a toll on me going through the sale process, probably more on the earn-out process, if I'm honest. But that's because, like all good entrepreneurs, I don't like being managed.

So I found it quite tricky working for somebody else. But I think it was the learning curve around understanding what it took to actually sell a business and how long that process took. And kind of holding my nerve through it, I was a founder-owner. So therefore I was still running the business and probably right in 80 % of the number. And so if I look back on the value of our business and what we wrote in those two quarters while I was negotiating the transaction.

The revenue of the business went down because my eye was off day to day and it was on. Where are we going for the exit? So yeah, learned loads, Jaryd. I reckon I could talk all day about this. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. so why is it pretty important for people to know that thinking about exiting, why did you exit and what are some of the reasons that people might want to exit?

So why did I exit? knew going into the second business, I was going in and out over a five-year period. I had something to prove; I had only ever been a contractor, an interim into businesses. I'd only ever been anywhere for two and a half years. So I thought it was as scientific as thinking. If I'm working for myself, I can go twice as long as I've ever managed working for someone else.

That was the whole theory around it and I wanted to prove I could do it. So I have done loads of turnaround, loads of transformation, and generated loads of money for other people and I thought, Let's make it happen. And it was coming off the back of a, from a personal perspective, tricky period. I'd just gone through a divorce and I kind of thought, I don't think I've got anything to lose. It's now or never 39.

It was the start of a midlife crisis really, Jaryd. I mean, I didn't buy a Porsche and do anything crazy; I built a business instead. Yeah, good. I think the way to go is to make some money instead of spending it out of that sort of time period in your life. Absolutely. So, like you said, you've been doing this for a long time. You've helped people make a lot of money, growing businesses, scaling a lot of businesses and selling them. What type of businesses have you and do you work with to help them scale and exit?

So the businesses we're working with at the minute for the Grafter are B2B and they tend to be doing 2 million turnovers, and they're up to 40 million. So they're in that space. They are a mashup of turnovers, mass and across varying sectors: fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, data, AI, obviously mean, rude not to in the current market.

Got a couple in the AI space, so right across the piece, to be honest. And the sector is less important, I think, perhaps than I anticipated it was going to be. If I look right across the businesses we've worked with in the last 14 months, without fail they've probably had 80 % of the same challenges, regardless of sector. Yeah, it's fascinating this across.

I mean, I've helped a lot of people scale businesses from six to seven figures, even up to eight figures and similar challenges, similar things that people face and all the philosophies that I like to teach in my courses. They run through all of those businesses and work on all those businesses.

And these are philosophies that I even use in my life to grow my life. inside, one of them is inside out growth, right? It's like working, listening to yourself, tuning into yourself, tuning into your business, seeing what's working, seeing what's not working, doing more of what's working, and doing less of what's not working.

And when you can automatically see this from one business or your life, you can revert that and relate it to another business or another person's life as well. Now I'd like to dig into, say, using one of these businesses as an example if you are open to it, like where, just so people can follow along with the journey, like some of the work that you do each step of the way. So you have somebody that comes to you and they've got this particular type of business.

Where were they when they came to you? What did you do to help them scale and grow their business? And what did you do to get them set up for exit? What was the exit valuation and what was their experience? I mean, there's a lot in there. I'll give a couple, Jaryd, if that's okay. Couple of different examples, one on the grow and scale and then one on the exit.

We've been around as a business for 14 months. So what we haven't yet done is all the way through growing scale, all the way through exit with one client. But I can tell the journey across a couple if that helps. Let's do it. So in terms of the growing scale, I'll talk about Coltech and Patrick.

It's business. So we started doing some work. Pat and I, we'd known each other with my previous business and he had supplied some people into me. was your previous business by the way, just to give context?

Sorry, of course. Different was the previous business and we were a design and build agency. So we've built services like the NHS app for the UK—nearly 40 million people using that app. Now I know a little bit about the UK, but I'm not a resident. standing for National Health Services.

Yeah, sorry, National Health Service. So in terms of accessing your record, accessing every interaction you've had with the hospital, with the GP, being able to request a repeat prescription, the appointments—that's the, sorry, that's the health app for the UK. We also built services during COVID. So the COVID home testing for the UK and 20 years other services.

So I sold that business in 2020 and Patrick's company, Coltech, applied some contractors to us whilst I was running that business. So we knew of each other. When I launched the graph, we reached out and he said, I could do with a hand around scaling the business, but also opening a proposition in the U .S. So they're a UK-based business. They have been out and out recruiting; with our help, we moved to the Capability as a Service offer. So what we actually did with Coltech was we started in the same way we start with every client, Jaryd, which is we go back to the strategy because plenty of times I think that seems to be missing in action. So we actually got physically into the room.

We are a remote first business, but for some work, we believe in getting in the room with a client. So we had a few days in the room working through the strategy and making it really tangible. So our version of building a strategy, and I'll talk about some of the tools, isn't let's build a pretty document that sits on a shelf that no one ever fucking reads again.

It's much more about let's do something really tangible, be clear about where this business is going to operate and why, and then look at the how, and then set a set of goals over a 12-month period and almost force the accountability and support that client and making them happen.

So we went through a process of looking at the strategy with Coltec and agreeing they wanted to pivot away from being a recruitment agency and they wanted to move towards capability as a service. And what I mean by that is not just putting people in for roles from a contract perspective.

So I need five project managers and three developers; this is my problem. Let me respond to that outcome and deliver that capability. So we did that with them from a UK perspective initially, and we did a raft of work around actually defining what those services were.

So all the way back to what does the service look like? What does it cost? How is it going to be supported? How are you going to make sure that the client has a high level of service delivery and some work with the team to change the operator model from thinking they were just shifting people into you're actually owning the outcome?

You've now got responsibility; you've got risk and worked through that whole process. Then we looked at the marketing side: how do we get these messages out from a social media perspective? How do we help change the positioning from a brand perspective and actually run some maybe testing and some campaigns?

And then we kicked off a very aggressive piece of work where we were taking this offer out to consultancies in the UK and providing capability as a service into consultancies on behalf of Coltech. And over that period of time, they wrote three quarters of a million of net new business over a nine-month period.

And they also happened to launch in the US as part of this work. A really good case study but also a good opportunity for us to work all the way through with a business that was probably already doing; they would have been doing in excess of $10 million. But what we did was actually write a tangible 750 grand of net new business with a couple of mil in the pipe. So a really aggressive growth over a short period. Congrats, congrats. have you got one? You said you've helped with e-businesses. I'd love to hear an Ecom show me if you've got one.

We've got a client with an e-commerce business that we've just started with. So probably the least comfortable one I am talking about actually, Jaryd, because it's a very early stage for us that one. And I'm not sure I can actually talk about it because we're still under contract, but please select another.

And I'm happy to talk about that. And, or I will tell you about a couple of the businesses we've helped exit. Yeah. Maybe I would love to hear about some of the mass businesses that you've helped scale. And then let's have a few questions around exiting.

What are some of the things that you've done to help people prepare for exit in terms of the time frame, documents, expectations and all those sorts of things—scaling a SaaS business? What are some of the things you've done that have helped scale a business like that?

So we've done, we've done work with a couple of different SaaS businesses, both working in healthcare in the UK. One of them is a business called Advice Inc. And they are providing services to the National Health Service in way of understanding what they're actually spending buying products from a healthcare perspective.

And by product, I mean a hip replacement in London and the cost of that versus a hip replacement and the component parts in Nottingham. So other parts of the country. we helped, I think, in looking at the strategy. Where are they going? Where are the growth opportunities over and above the sector that they're working in currently? And it became obvious that there was a piece of work needed to actually re-platform their business for scale and for growth.

And I think that's the bit that lots of businesses that support scaling want to move purely on the revenue. And I understand that. But if you sell something you can't deliver, it's going to bite you on the arse very quickly. And the bit for advising was that there was a concentrated piece of work needed from a technical architecture perspective to really shore up what they were doing from a technical perspective and build out the ability to scale the service.

And so there was a concentrated period. We were running a number of work streams. We looked at the strategy with a business and we put together a roadmap around how they start to go out around growth and look at parallel sectors, build an advisory board, but also be mindful. You don't want to push foot to the floor on that until the platform is ready for additional scaling.

And the other SaaS-based business that we've worked with and continue to work with, Saad, has, again, worked into healthcare in the UK. And in way of their business, what we've been working with them on is actually pivoting from software as a service to software with a service and by definition, in the UK at the minute, the way the National Health Service is buying services and buying outcomes means there has become a bit of a race to the bottom on what these providers are charging purely for software and what we'd identified as part of the strategy work was the NHS needs to buy these services but has a different part of money.

And they're looking for an outcome. So if we look purely in the pot for technology and the buying of SaaS stuff, know that part's diminishing. But if we look at, can we deliver an actual outcome and own that service, then there's a bigger pot and a much larger opportunity to make a difference? we supported them something and see if it works; they would prefer to buy a result that was provided and prefer to buy an outcome for that. Right.

Like every human being is like this. So why not? Of course, it's a lot heavier on the business in terms of a tech skills team to deliver and support, but you can have a bigger business and make more money. I think you've hit the nail on the head. So the journey that we've been supporting is: how do we get that to market? But also, how do we make sure, from an internal business perspective, the business understands that they are no longer a technology business, a SaaS-based business purely, but a technology-based consultancy that they're moving towards?

And so there's been a lot of internal work around the operating model and moving them in that direction. So what they have done is written a really strong number in way of owning an outcome into an NHS organization. And this is the first one over the line. And from here, we will start to accelerate that growth. But they have an incredible product and an incredible service.

The complexity of how these services are being commissioned has changed. And the reality is, as business owners, we've got to pivot and we've got to be prepared to move and get creative.

Yeah, I absolutely agree.

I think that there can be a lot of ego, especially when you're consuming content online about how people have scaled their own business and a self-made entrepreneur and all that sort of stuff. When realistically, how you grow a business is by listening to what your customers want and just changing to give them what they want at that period of time.

Things change and what people want changes based on the market and the environment. And if it needs to be more hands-on in a certain period of time or less hands-on in a certain period of time, just give them what they want and they'll open up their wallet.

Right?

It's funny, Gerard, because I blog about this a lot and talk about it a lot. I think people are always searching for the eternal product market fit. We all are, and we all will. But the reality is that the market will dictate what it wants from any of us. And that's my personal view.

And if you slavishly follow what you think you want to take to market, then more for you, because it's not going to happen. And I wholeheartedly agree. But I'm heartened, I think, to see and work with other entrepreneurs who are open to pivoting, making the change, revisiting the strategy. It's not an arcade; let's do it once a year and stick it on a shelf.

Every three months, let's have a look and make sure that our goals are aligned and that we haven't got competition coming in left field that we weren't aware of. The community we serve hasn't stopped buying in this way. And so there's so many variables that need constant, I guess, working on not in the business is how I describe that and supporting entrepreneurs.

us to do that. absolutely. Like, yeah, I'm with you, like constant assessment of how are we delivering this product, what's the result that we're getting and how do they feel about that? What's their feedback? Take that feedback back.

And you can do that every six months. You can even do that for every single client and be like, They like this. They didn't like this. Let's do more of what they liked and less of what they didn't like. Make them happier. And more of the market's going to be happy with that too. If that's our main type of audience and client.

And this whole, especially in the info product world, is like all you need is one offer, right? And often needs to be so good and better than everybody else's. the reality is that, like, you don't just need to think about one offer. Your offer is going to change all the time. If you're an adaptable businessperson and adaptable business to provide what people need at the specific time as things change.

Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. And I think lots of the businesses we work with as well, Jaryd, they're bootstrapped. And so they are not sitting on a lot of cash from an investor and thinking they must get a nice new office and replatform the product. It is what's coming in that is going back out. It's constantly reinvesting. It's scrappy and we need to be super diligent about what is happening around us to help inform that decision-making. Yep, I love it.

Are they saying, Hey, I want to scale first and then exit, or are they coming to you saying, I want to exit? That's my main intention. And to get there, I want to scale. What's the conversation? Yeah, that's a great question actually, Gerard. So we've had a mix is the honest answer. And I think we must eat our own dog food as well as a business around how we approach that. So what has happened in the last 14 months is that we have had people come to us who've said we want to exit.

We've then scratched the surface. They don't want to exit. They want to work with us, which is very complimentary. And we absolutely will want to work with them, but it's more around the grow and the scale and then exploring exit. I think we're probably going to try and change that narrative because I have a strong view that if you're planning on exiting in three years, there is a way that you set the business up for success and you make sure you're really clear around those markers from a financial perspective.

But also, you're more deliberate about some of the moves that you make. And that's very much what we've built out with 8 Figure. 8 Figure is a platform and a service to help entrepreneurs plan for exit, get their house in order, build a data room, build a cell pack, and get evaluated. And once we've got that stake in the ground, what we want to be able to do is say your business, know, give it a scenario, your business is currently worth a million.

But if you make a variety of different moves around growth and around scaling, then we can take that from a million to three over a 12-month period. And that's what this, this grow-and-scale service looks like. So we're going to start driving it the other way around. To date, we've had people come in at various points. We've had effectively three or four front doors so they could come in and say we want to exit or they could come in and say we want to grow and scale.

But I think we're going to start to steer that a little clearer over the next few months. And so you mentioned a couple of things. And when somebody is wanting an exit, you put a stake in the ground. That's the exit valuation. That's what you want the business to look like. And then you obviously go away and reverse engineer where that business would be at that current time to that stake in the ground to and set up a strategy to where they're at now and take those steps to get to that stake in the ground.

You've described that much more eloquently than me, Jaryd. I'll rip that off for later when I'm pitching. Chuck that in a TikTok video. I will. Thank you for that.

You're welcome. Great. Thank you. How long a time... It's going to be in how long is a piece of string, but typically, how long a timeframe are you suggesting people have to get from staking the ground rewind backwards Is it one, two, or three years? You mentioned three years before and across the board, with a bunch of different types of businesses, I know a bunch of things that need to be conveyed in terms of data and all that sort of stuff to acquire a business.

But what are some of the things you need to get the business or the business owner to have getting order ready for the business to be sellable and very attractive to a buyer? Yeah, I think that's a great question. So I think that there are a raft of artifacts and structures and ways of working and awareness and kind of planning around things like where has the business been financially?

What is it looking like from a potential addressable market versus where have they been? But it's also how is the market moving the competition; what are they up to? But a lot of the time, what we're finding is that things like building out a cellpack, being able to articulate that story and that opportunity and putting together a data room—even at a basic level—are things that founders inherently don't know and do because they haven't been through that process before.

So the eight-figure exit service is about to get the valuation of today and get clear on what the cellpack and the data room look like. Then it looks at how we increase the revenue and how we look at the levers in the business to make it as efficient as possible. And then there are a couple of modules that are all about the founder as an individual. What do they really want from this exit?

Where are they going? What are they planning on doing? And encouraging them to really think some of this stuff through potential buyers, aligning the potential buyer's culture with the business that they've created, but also thinking about what the number is part of the nirvana around selling a business, but being tied in for three years or five years as part of an earn-out is psychologically very hard for plenty of buzzers as entrepreneurs.

And then it's also about making sure that there are no skeletons in the closet and that there are no surprises. That meant that you gave 5 % of the business to help you out in the first few months. You know, that sort of stuff needs tidying up before you get ready to go out to market because these things have a nasty habit. People are strange with money and they have a nasty habit of coming back and biting you on the backside.

So it's really about making sure that you've got the house as tidy as possible. The analogy that I use is that you wouldn't sell your flat or your house without throwing the hoof around and making sure that it looked as good as possible. And it's the same process, but it's also asking some pretty searching questions of the founder.

One of the other bits that I think is really unique in what we do is that we actually take the founder on a bit of a journey themselves around emotional intelligence around building resilience, all things that, from firsthand experience of going through the sale and the earn-out period, my mental health was definitely impacted on that process. having that sounding board, that experience, and a safe space to talk some of that stuff through is incredibly powerful. Wow. There's so much in that.

I totally agree. You hear people that have sold their business for millions, eight figures, whatever it is, and that afterwards they're like, I mean, what do I do now with my life? They feel maybe they, and I've got friends that have sold businesses that are like, I probably should have kept the business.

And emotional intelligence and also not setting expectations but adjusting their point of view of how certain outcomes can happen. Setting expectations is a limiting belief, but adjusting their certain point of view and being flexible with how things may play out based on one type of buyer versus another type of buyer based on how much involvement you need or don't need in the business after sale is super important because it's crushing, absolutely crushing for somebody going, the most important thing and they're only focusing on one thing, like, I want to sell for 10 mil or I want to sell for 8 mil and they get the price but it costs them so much more than they're willing to actually pay or thinking they could actually pay.

It's pretty crazy. I think you've hit the nail on the head there and it's not the problem. I don't know about you, Jaryd, but you know, my friends are in every conceivable walk of life. So I can't pick up the phone after I sold the business for eight figures and go; I'm feeling my mental health's a bit impaired through the sale of the business.

Plenty of my friends would be like, See you later, loser. Because people come from different walks of life, they operate in a different way. mean, if you sell your business for eight figures and people's like, I just saw my business for 10 mil. I'm not happy about it. they going to be shut up, man? Like, what are you talking about?

Yeah. Yeah. It depends on who you surround yourself with. mean, you might have a couple of people in your circle that you be able to talk to, but maybe the vast majority—know, it's hard for your family to see who you were when you were a child compared to where you are now.

Right.

Yeah, it's a really interesting point, Matt. I went through a similar process and I think the bit for me was kind of grief on selling the business. It was my baby. I was very emotionally attached to the team. I spent a lot of time; it was very cathartic, but I wrote 16 blogs about the concept of the sale of the business that I debated. Am I going to create a book? And for some unknown reason, it looks like that book may happen later this year. I went through that process and kind of did that for two reasons. One, it was cathartic for me personally.

But the other thing was, I thought that may be useful for other people who go through the journey because there's that preconception that you're straight down the Porsche garage, the Ferrari garage, you're buying a yacht, you're setting off into the sunset. Now don't get me wrong, there definitely is that element of some of that, or you're off living in Bali, but there are varying different flavors.

But the bit that I had to work on with myself a lot and with my coach after I sold the business was not to make super impulsive decisions because I knew that they would be short-lived, and I did end up buying the Porsche. It lasted six months because I resented paying 140 quid to fill the tank, but 20-year-old me wanted that car. It seems 46-year-old me wasn't that interested. You've got to realize some of those childhood dreams as well.

Yeah, I guess it's all part of the journey, isn't it? And we're driven in a different way, entrepreneurs. We're not your normal nine-to-fiveers. We don't want that stability of the paycheck. We're chasing something different. Yeah, we're not normal. And that's good.

I'm happy to not be normal. Being normal is a scary thing for me. yeah, I guess though, as entrepreneurs, and I have seen this before, where people want to make an exit and they want to make the money and they are trying to fulfill a part of them that is a younger version of themselves that reality where they're at in their life, like you said, as a 40 year old, you're like, it's not necessary for me.

That's a great learning experience for you and for others Like, hang on, like, what do you want to sell your business for? Like, and who for is it for you where you're at now? Or is it for different fragments or parts of you as a child that you need to get, need to fill or fulfill? And can you even if you did have that, if you sold it for a hundred million, would you still be happy because you've gotten all the things that you wanted as a child?

Not living though, currently in a different state or a different position at the age that you're in now. So it's something pretty important. I believe as we talk about strategy, Rachel and growing a business and all of that, the most important thing really is what is the EQ of the owner of the business that is allowing the main filter that's allowing these strategies to either play out or not play out or what they're moving towards. That's the most important thing is the person that owns the business and being fulfilled, I believe, is like the business is a tool for the owner of the business.

Yeah. And it's also Jaryd; the biggest challenge that we have is if the emotional intelligence of those founders isn't going on the journey as we transform their businesses. It's a big risk because we can transform a business around somebody, but how catastrophic would that be if they're not on the journey and actually understanding what we're doing to their business, which is why that initial 12 weeks around eight figure exit is heavily preparing for exit.

And it is even heavier preparing that founder for what it's going to look like and making sure that, from resilience, emotional intelligence and understanding themselves, they are in a position to really get it. It's not for the faint-hearted because the challenge around that, staying power, I've personally found the staying power during earnout was the hardest bit for me because there were plenty of times where I just wanted to say, Forget the money, forget this, this is not worth the impact on my mental health.

And it took a lot out of me that period, but it also taught me a lot of lessons. But the overriding lesson was in coming into building this business. It's not good enough to just build an eight-figure exit service that's all about the business. If we don't arm the founders with those, the rest of those skills, then we do run a massive risk of doing half the job, which is probably my biggest fear, which is why I'm so keen that it's two sides to the coin.

And we're also into a world—think now, Jaryd—where people want to understand themselves better. A 20-year-old me would not have been meditating, doing wind-path breathing, and, mainly, because I was too busy at raving. But it's all part of evolving and wanting to learn and applying that to personal life and business life. absolutely.

Absolutely. Wow. This, I mean, we could chat for another hour. I'm tempted to hop on a plane, actually, mate. I reckon we could talk for a few days. Yeah, absolutely. Set up some strategies; help some founders be fulfilled. Be fun. Yeah.

Rachel, thank you so much for coming on. Where can we send people to send out more about what you're up to, your eight-figure exit and your scale service?

it's www .thegrafter .com. yeah, everything that we're doing is there. I think there's also a YouTube channel that we've actually put live yesterday. So yeah, very happy to chat to people.

Awesome! Guys, reach out to Rachel. Rachel, it's been a pleasure chatting. I'm glad that we connected and everybody, there'll be links with all of those links in the show notes. Please say hello to Rachel and yeah, thanks again for coming on.

Well, thanks, Jaryd; I really appreciate your time.

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Host:

Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives. 

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